Sunday, November 16, 2014

Buttercup II: The Revengening

10 seasons. 213 episodes. 0 ghosts.How do they still have their jobs?

So the problem with TV documentaries and reality shows about things like Bigfoot and UFO's, is that we know how they're all going to end. Like, of course the guys from Ghost Hunters aren't going to catch a ghost on camera because A: it's preposterous and B: if they did, we wouldn't have to wait until it airs to hear about it. We live in the age of Twitter and Facebook, so if some jackass from The History Channel actually got an alien to sit down for an interview that shit'd be all over the internets at the speed of stupid.

Um...hurray for climate change?

Why then, are these guys still releasing their documentary about cloning a woolly mammoth? Oh yes, I said cloning a woolly mammoth. Sound familiar? Thanks to some still-juicy samples squeezed from the remarkably well-preserved remains of a 40,000 year-dead woolly mammoth (named, I shit you not, Buttercup) released from the rapidly melting Siberian permafrost, scienceticians from South Korea are attempting to clone the extinct mammoths back to life for...uh, some reason. I guess.

The documentary is going to be called How to Clone a Woolly Mammoth and like I said, don't hold your breath for the startling reveal of a freshly-cloned Buttercup II eating peanuts out of some scientist's hand. While the corpse is in relatively good shape, they haven't yet found any viable cells. A better title would probably be How to Want to Clone Woolly Mammoth.

How to Clone a Woolly Mammoth joins Downton Abbey, American Pickers andeverything else on television as a show not about successfully cloning a woolly mammoth.

Pictured: An animal shelter, where they'll just give you a new goddamn dog.

Now, I know what you're thinking: 'This is an abomination!' and 'How dare they play God!' Well settle down, because they're not so much playing God as they are playing rich dog-owner. This same technique has been used clone the beloved pets of the super-wealthy at, get this, $100,000 a pop. That's right, people with too much money can get a clone of their dead dog. Of course, it's not really the same dog, just a genetically-identical duplicate with a different life-experience and a price tag that could have put like four kids through college, but whatever floats your yacht, right?

Anyway, maybe it's not such a bad thing that cloning doesn't work the way rich idiots think it does. I mean, there's a decent chance that early humans hunted Buttercup and her species to extinction and the last thing we need is a woolly mammoth revenge-based stomping spree.